One of the fascinating things about the theatre, I think, worldwide, is that practically every advance, every development of any importance has come out of a company situation. If you look at Stanislavsky's work with Chekhov and the Muscovite's Theatre, Brecht's work with the Berliner Ensemble, Jean-Louis Barrault's company, Jean Vilar's company, everybody – and I hope to say now, perhaps in small print, Peter Hall's Royal Shakespeare Company – for a certain time made advances, made new kinds of drama because of the company. Now, what is it about a company? Well, it's a group of actors that stay together long enough to know not only how they like each other, but how they dislike each other. I mean, there is a real living quality. I… I think why I do what I do is because, I mean, it's… it's not for success – I'm not quite sure what success is because it's… has many hues – it's not for money, it's not for publicity. It's because if you have the right group, the right ensemble, the right company, you achieve a creativity and a sharing with you, with everybody, which makes you think this is how a good family ought to be. This is how a good tribe ought to be, a good country, a good democracy, a good world, indeed, and you actually come out of rehearsal better than you went in, having done work which is better than you are, and that… that also goes for the… for the… the actors as well. So from the very first stirrings of my ambition, I knew about that and wanted to somehow subscribe to that and I saw it happening with Gielgud and Ashcroft at the Haymarket as a boy, and Olivier and… and Richardson and Guinness and Leighton, at… at the Old Vic which was then at… at the New Theatre. So although I was at this tiny theatre, The Arts, even then I started to try and make a group of actors linked together and I got quite a number of very talented people: Ronnie Barker, for heaven's sake, John Schlesinger, both gone now, alas. They were with me at The Arts. And although one couldn't actually form a company that had any longevity at The Arts for economic reasons, because you couldn't pay people enough – you know, it was £8 per week and luncheon vouchers – I was trying to get a group together, so when I went to Stratford for the first time in 1956 to do Love's Labours Lost I was rather appalled by what I found, because there were three kinds of actors at Stratford at that moment: there were the old guard who were very Irvingesque and very rotund and round and slow spoken and musical; there were the fellows who'd been brought up on Coward and Rattigan and they… they threw it all away and didn't want to say a line of poetry, so it sounded like a line of poetry, good heavens, no; and there were the new lot coming out of drama school in droves, saying, ‘I'm from Manchester and I don't care who knows it and that's the way I'm going to speak’. And one was trying to take these three people – lots of people – and make them coalesce into a Shakespearian company who at least sounded as if they were on the same planet. And it was almost impossible.
